Some changes were made to TVSA over the long weekend, most notably the addition of a new Blogs Homepage.
Ever since TVSA granted bloggers the ability to write articles about any topic, the TV articles have tended to get lost amongst all the non-TV articles.
Since this is primarily a television website we felt it was necessary to categorise blogs to make it easier for readers to find TV-specific blogs, as well as to give non-TV blogs some categories of their own.
The TVSA homepage was being dominated by opinion blogs on a wide variety of subjects, so our solution was to remove all almost blogs from the TVSA Homepage and to give them their own homepage instead.
We made some other changes as well:
1. The number of Featured Columns on the site homepage was increased from six to eight.
2. The other blogs (ie. those that are not Featured) have been removed from the homepage, except for a few key blogs that are mostly information-based. All of these blogs are written by TVSA Staff.
3. The new Blogs Homepage - and every single existing blog - has been categorised into the following categories: Television, Celebs, Music, Sport, Personal and General.
All blogs are now assigned to one of those categories.
A brief explanation of the categories:
TelevisionBlogs that are primarily about TV.
CelebsBlogs that are primarily about celebrities.
MusicBlogs that are primarily about music or musicians.
SportBlogs that are primarily about sport.
PersonalBlogs that are used as personal diaries.
GeneralBlogs that do not fit into any of the categories above.
Note: existing bloggers may have blogs that are split between TV and non-TV topics. We are adding a function soon that will allow such bloggers to move their articles from one blog to another.
If, for example, you have a TV-themed blog with a few non-TV articles in it, you can create a new blog for your non-TV articles and move the articles from your TV blog into your new one, thus splitting your articles into two different blogs, in two different categories.
4. Each new blog category on the Blogs Homepage also has the latest five replies in that category at the top of the page.
5. All blogs that were created before September this year - and which had no articles in them - were deleted. In future, any blogs that have no articles in them one month after their creation date will be automatically deleted.
We will also be implementing further changes shortly, which we will keep you updated on. The most important of these will be a modification to allow you to assign any new blog you create to one of the pre-approved categories above.
You can access the new Blogs Homepage by using the red menu at the top of the page (hover your mouse over the Blogs link in the menu and click on Blogs Homepage).